Villa Valmarana Bressan was the first occasion in which I experienced what will later be known as the Serliana , the module of my Basilica and the solution of many of my other designs . In my eyes it was something similar to a drawing by Raphael , for the facade of the building of San Lorenzo , something in Palazzo Tè in Mantua , but I was looking for a cleaner, lighter shape, to then amaze inside with the grandeur of the Roman thermal structures . The first experiments, in

I had never received any assignments for religious buildings in Vicenza in my first fifty years. My friends and clients, the Trissino, the Thiene, the Da Porto, the Angarano, the Repeta and several others lived on the border between Roman Orthodoxy and heresy, having imported the winds of continental reform from the continent to Vicenza. My son Orazio was directly involved. However, I would later become the architect of the Venetian families closest to Rome, as well as of Car

With the Teatro Olimpico, my latest work. Everything was crowned, everything was finished. Now I understood: he had to be small, he had to be here and not at the Redeemer. The small temple with a central plan, my ideal church. Just as the Rotonda had been ideal, among the villas, here my friend - I could now afford to call friends the greatest Venetians of my time, I a man of such humble origins - my friend Marcantonio Barbaro gave me the opportunity to realize a small Panthe

Girolamo, the grandson of the queen of Cyprus-Caterina Corner, was dying: this is how his son Giorgio, who owned half the property in Piombino, called me to design a beautiful, delightful and comfortable villa. By now I had become famous in Venice, sought by the most important families to hurry to live in the mansion I created for them: so, immediately after the wedding with Elena Contarini, only the central block finished, the Cornaro family already moved there, inviting me

Everything was accomplished here, in this final act. I lived an extraordinary life, and this is my gift to Vicenza, to its families, to Venice, to history. With deep gratitude I remember my reliefs at the Berga Theater, the Roman theater of my city. Five thousand seats, how much I wanted to be there. Live that Vicenza, and then from there leave for Rome, for that Rome. With the Academy that I had helped to found several years earlier together with my friends, we had obtained

The palace of one of the apostolic families of Venice , inside a huge park full of water, was built over the centuries, well beyond my little history. Great works are like this: they transcend the men who imagined them, those who designed them, those who built them. And they belong to all of them, through the generations. There is an initial idea of ​​mine here, when you could still see an ancient castle still to be refined, to be rescued from the bad weather and the roughne

Cavalier Bonifacio Pojana was a worthy heir to his family: a strong man of arms, with a beard that framed a powerful jaw, eyes wide and wide open under the forehead, a stern gaze. The undisputed lord of his fiefdom, for centuries, always alongside Venice . So I designed his villa , having discovered in my travels to Rome that power and elegance can go hand in hand with some simplicity, if well designed, as in the Baths of Diocletian. Together with the war frescoes, this sober

Leonardo, son of my friend Giovanni Alvise Valmarana and his very noble wife Isabella Nogarole, on the occasion of the death of his brother Antonio, asked me to design the family chapel in the crypt of the temple of S. Corona, the Vicenza shrine. The sacred , death, perpetuity: four years earlier my sons Leonidas and Orazio died, four years later it would be my turn, I too buried here, like the greatest Vicentines.

Girolamo Forni was another of mine - not many to tell the truth - bourgeois clients.​ Like the notary Cogollo for example, for whom I had studied a similar solution on the facade.​ He supplied wood to many of my sites, such as that of Palazzo Chiericati , and had grown rich. He was an entrepreneur who painted himself, who collected antiques, which he then founded together with me and Vittoria and I considered him our friend. So it was that out of friendship I redesigned, wha